MATLAB Programming

Overview
Overview
This overview covers the followingtopics:
• “File Types Supported by MATLAB” on page 6-3
• “Other MATLAB I/O Capabilities” on page 6-5
• “Functions Used in File Management” on page 6-7
For more information and examples on importing and exporting data, see
Technical Note 1602:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/tech-notes/1600/1602.html
File Types Supported by MATLAB
MATLAB provides many ways to load data from disk files or the clipboard
into the workspace, a process called importing data. Alsotherearemany
ways to save workspace variables to a disk file, a process called exporting
data. Your choice of which import or export mechanism to use depends mainly
on the format of the data being transferred: text, binary, or a standard format
such as JPEG.
Note For unsupported high-level function data formats, you can use the
MATLAB low-level file I/O functions if you know how the binary data is
formatted in the file. See “Using Low-Level File I/O Functions” on page 6-103
for more information.
MATLAB has built-in capabilities to import and export the following types
of data files:
• “Binary Data from a MATLAB Session” on page 6-4
• “Text Data” on page 6-4
• “Graphics Files” on page 6-4
• “Audio and Audio/Video Data” on page 6-4
• “Spreadsheets” on page 6-5
6-3